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Abstract

In Canadian schools, languages other than English and French are offered, such as Chinese, Spanish, German, and others. In order to help students in these programs develop to their fullest potentials, more research is necessary to explore the realities regarding students’ construction of identifications through multiple languages and literacies. Most previous studies on multilingual children’s literacies and identities have viewed literacy as a product and identity as an essential part of self associated with dimensions of culture, ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion, race, and generation. Little attention has been paid to the dynamic processes within children’s multiple literacy practices and the proliferation of cultural flows, modes of belonging, and new practices of citizenship that mobilize minds and bodies with identifications beyond nation-states.
This study explores the multiplicity of how children in a Mandarin-English bilingual program become literate and how they form their sense of identities in a dynamic process. The study draws from a rhizomatic framework of transculturation, transnationalism, translanguaging and poststructural perspectives of literacies and identities as processes of becoming. Data for the study were collected by multiple methods: 1) classroom observations of eight students across their academic years of grade five and six, 2) semi-structured interviews with their parents, teachers, and the program coordinator, 3) students’ documents and artifact collection, and 4) additional conversations and email communications with the students.
Results indicate that the multilingual children in the study exceeded language boundaries and revealed highly creative uses of languages. They were engaged in complex, multi-layered, fluid, and context-dependent multilingual communication in different social networks, challenged the dominant discourse of any fixed and hyphenated identity, and took on transcultural and transnational identities that allowed for comfortable circulation among different worlds. Meanwhile, their life experiences, virtual and actual, assembled in and across different contexts and contributed to their reading, reading the world, and self.
Implications of this research suggest the need to expand poststructural perspectives of literacies and identities to include multilingual and multicultural issues. Educators need to recognize they are teaching far more than the letters of the alphabet and unfold children’s multiple and mobile identities to explore new possibilities for life. This research also provides insights to inform policy-makers concerning heritage language and bilingual teaching in Canada.